Although he hopes that his works will surprise
him, Myron Krueger feels that "nothing should happen in an interactive
medium25 since this would
be confusing to the interactor. Other artists create artworks that are
not intended to be an extension of the interactor; their creations are
essentially self-motivated and autonomous. These automata survey and manoeuvre
through their environment, of which the spectators are only one aspect.

The Holy Grail for these artists is the
self-replicating, self-sustaining machine -- artificial life. The immediate
aims are less lofty. Norman
White aims to endow his robots with what he has termed 'artificial
sanity', which he defines simply as the machine's ability to make sense
of its environment.

Whereas most interactive works present
acoustic, visual or conceptual environments, these works present individual
entities. As a result their interactions with the public take on the nature
of social behaviours and relationships. Although these works use many of
the approaches and technologies used by other kinds of interactive works,
it is not the individual interactor who is reflected in these works so
much human behaviour itself. In a sense, the responsive environment and
the automaton complement each other, representing both sides of the relationship
between man, and the social and natural environment.

A particularly provocative example is White's
Helpless Robot. This is an unusual robot because although capable of perceiving,
it is incapable of moving.

I see the work behaving as the
classic "hustler". For instance, it might initially enlist human cooperation
with a polite "Excuse me... have you got a moment?", or any one of such
unimposing phrases. It might then ask to be rotated: "Could you please
turn me just a bit to the right... No! not that way... the other way!"
In such a way, as it senses cooperation, it tends to become ever more demanding,
becoming in the end, if its human collaborators let it, dictatorial.26

Another of White's robots, Facing Out, Laying
Low, interacts with its audience and environment, but can become bored
or over-stimulated, in which cases it becomes deliberately anti-social
and stops interacting.

This kind of behaviour may seem counter-productive,
and frustrating for the audience. But for White, the creation of these
robots is a quest for self-understanding. He balances self-analysis with
creation, attempting to produce autonomous creatures that mirror the kinds
of behaviours that he sees in himself. These behaviours are not necessarily
willfully programmed; they often emerge as the synergistic result of experiments
with the interactions between simple algorithmic behaviours. Just as billions
of simple water molecules work together to produce the complex behaviours
of water (from snow-flakes to fluid dynamics), combinations of simple programmed
operations can produce complex characteristics, which are called emergent
properties, or self-organizing phenomena.

These emergent properties, like the surprises
that Krueger and Seawright seek, represent, to interactive artists, transcendence
of the closed determinism implied by the technology and the artists' own
limitations. While such unexpected characteristics delight artists, they
represent the ultimate nightmare for most engineers. The complex systems
within which we already live and operate are perfect breeding grounds for
emergent behaviours, and this must be taken into account as we move into
greater and greater integration and mediation. (Next
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